1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus that performs print setting, and to an information processing method and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printer is usually controlled by software called a printer driver operating on a personal computer (PC). The printer driver has two major roles. One role is to allow a user to change printer setting and generally has a user interface (UI). Another role is to convert a rendering command from an application into a page description language (PDL) which can be interpreted by a printer, and transmit data to the printer.
There is such a type of a printer driver as a generic printer description (GPD) based printer driver in printer drivers in Windows (registered trade mark) operating system (OS).
In the GPD based printer driver, a printer driver prepared as a standard in the OS based on a GPD file of a text format created by a printer manufacturer generates a user interface (UI) of the printer driver. From now on, the GPD based printer driver seems to dominate printer drivers in the Windows OS because of its high security.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-172201 discusses a technique in which a user can input any character string via the UI of a printer driver.
However, the GPD based printer driver has a problem that the UI for allowing the user to input arbitrary character strings cannot be generated. For example, even though the user desires to input a watermark-print character-string as a watermark into print setting, such a UI cannot be generated. This is due to GPD specifications, and print setting can be specified only from existing choices described in the GPD. A printer driver using postscript printer description (PPD) having a similar format to the GPD has also the similar problem.